You are here

Kimberly Brooks

Audio Tabs

Music Credit: “Foreric piano study,” composed and performed by Todd Barton, from the EP Metascapes.

Kimberly Brooks: Like, I break up with paintings all the time. I’m like, “Ah, I had so much hope for you, and this is over now.” I can’t deal with it. I can’t deal with the painting. I don’t want to look at it. It depresses me. And then, like, months will go by, and then I’ll be like, “You know what? I’m going to pick up that piece. I have nothing to lose, and I’m just going to go attack it,” and those are the paintings that tend to be the best ones. I wish I could plan those, but, you know.

Joe Reed: That’s painter Kimberly Brooks, and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

Kimberly Brooks isn’t a household name, but she’s a supremely talented mid-career artist whose star has been steadily rising. Not only has she been showcased in numerous juried exhibitions, she’s that rarest of rare birds, a painter whose shows typically sell out. And little wonder, you know the way you visualize things in your mind—whether it’s a memory or a daydream—a little bit hazy with things blending into one another but utterly recognizable. That’s the way Kimberly Brooks paints. She tells stories with her work, but with her use of color and transparent fluid images, she leaves room for her viewers to add narratives of their own—to use their own imaginations as they enter the worlds of her canvasses. And It’s equally significant that the Los Angeles-based artist also doesn’t stand still—her painting evolves, but it’s still of a piece…an examination of memory, opulence, and history whether it was the portraiture of her earlier years or her current work which weaves together elements of representation and abstraction. At the moment, Kimberly has a show in Los Angeles at the Zevitas Marcus Gallery and it’s aptly named Brazen.

Kimberly Brooks: This is one of my larger bodies of work, and I incorporate a lot of silver and gold leaf. It’s a new direction for me, because I’m painting less people and it’s more about painting itself, and it’s doing really well.

Kimberly Brooks: Exactly. <laughs> This was a big fear that I had when I decided to experiment with this because I’m an oil painter and traditionally gold leaf and silver leaf is something that is applied on wood. I had to kind of come up with a technique that would allow me to think of it like a color. So I really was, just wanted to experiment, with taking it to a new place.

Joe Reed: What prompted the use of gold and silver leaf?

Kimberly Brooks: I’ve been thinking a lot about historical places and memory and the way we think of places or imagine them, you know when we’re reading a book, and we imagine a setting that’s being described in the book. And I wanted to somehow capture the opulence of what I saw in my mind. I went to Berlin last summer, and I visited many places and in particular some palaces outside Potsdam. And I was so struck by the grandeur and the outrageousness of what I saw, and I wanted to try to capture these outrageously gilded ceilings and walls in paint. And that sort of led me on the path to experimenting with that media.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you this very mundane question. Gold leaf is notoriously difficult to work with. How was it mastering that?

Kimberly Brooks: Well, you know, it is, and that’s part of the challenge. Making a painting is a process of layering. First, you do a ground, you do a wash. There’s all sorts of different ways and architectures to approach a painting and gold leaf in and of itself is like a four-step process because you have to prime the surface and then you have to put some kind of varnish or adhesive, some kind of a resin that will allow it to land just right. I want it to float onto the canvas and land, and it’s so beautiful to watch that happen, it’s eerie. There’s a whole science that’s been lost, and I use a very traditional method of painting, and it just works beautifully. So it’s hard, but it forces you to slow down and be more thoughtful, but that’s a good thing.

Jo Reed: How do you begin a painting?

Kimberly Brooks: Ah, that’s such a great question. Conceptually I think about the painting. So I think about what I want it to be about, and depending on whether or not it’s an abstract or representational or figurative, or whether it’s like in between. I start to mull on the pallet and the feeling that I want, and a vague idea of the subject. I have to have those things pretty thought through in my mind before I begin. And then from there, I start to think about a couple of things; I think about what colors overall, and what type of surface need to be at the very bottom of the painting, not at the surface but at the bottom so that that’s going to be your scaffolding for the whole thing. And then I’ll, sometimes I’ll do a glaze over it, and then wipe away the shapes to get the highlights or I’ll do a loose outline. I never use charcoal because I don’t want to add a fixative to prevent it from leaking into the color. I’m very particular about that sort of thing, but anyway, clearly this is something I could talk about for hours, but it’s a big subject.

Jo Reed: You’ve said that you want to be a painting whisperer. <Laughs>

Kimberly Brooks: Ah. <Laughs>

Jo Reed: Explain what that means.

Kimberly Brooks: It’s funny you said that, because it’s almost-- another way to say it, it’s a snake-charming process. You know, you begin and you begin with this idea in your head like I just described. There’s a pallet, there’s a feeling and, you know, you prep the canvas and you got your structure that you have in mind and then you begin and then when you begin, something magical happens hopefully and that is that the painting starts to say what it wants and that can completely override what you had intended in the first place. You know, when you start off as a painter there’s a tendency to want to flex your muscles and show that you can make a perfect eye or a perfect mouth or a perfect egg balancing on the counter or a perfect way the water drop that will reflect off of a leaf and then that takes this hyper-focusing narrow and you get closer and closer to this realist vision. But when you’re conjuring a painting, you have to leave this, you know, the older, wiser painter I become, the more I leave that space wide open so that I can listen to the process and stop way before I had intended. This just happened to me yesterday. I was working on a great big piece and I had huge plans of all these things I was going to do and, you know, two-thirds of the way through and then I stood back and I went, “Ah, it’s done.” Like, I just knew that it was done. So, you have to be open for that sort of a thing.

Kimberly Brooks: Yes. “The Stylist Project.” Well, if you don’t mind, I could go back. I need to kind of talk about a work before that called--

Jo Reed: “Mom’s Friends.”

Kimberly Brooks: --“Mom’s Friends.” Exactly, yeah.

Jo Reed: <laughs> Yeah.

Kimberly Brooks: One of my first exhibitions was around the time that I had, you know, I have two small children. And I was looking at the way my daughter looked at me, and I started painting the way that I recall looking at my own mother. And so I grew up in Mill Valley in the ‘70s, and it was sort of this strange time in history in the Women’s Movement when women were really coming into, and it was a particular moment. So I wanted to capture that just to understand it better, so I painted all these paintings of my imagination of my mother and her friends, and they were gorgeous and glamorous. It’s not like today where people don’t dress up. People dressed up back then. You know, they just, they wore, you know, I just remember all of this. My mother had--

Jo Reed: People dressed up to go to the airport.

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah, exactly. Like, exactly. To go to the movies, you know, you dressed up. You know, you never would be wearing jeans. To go on an airplane was like a big event, you know, and that is just, you know, catnip for a painter. The patterns and the silk, you know, and the big sunglasses. So what I did was I went to a used clothing store but like a fancy one, one that had, like, gorgeous ‘70s outfits, and I asked my friends to pose in them for me so that I could recreate the vibe. So I got really into fashion as a language within painting.

Jo Reed: What was it about fashion in particular that spoke to you? In terms of a subject for painting.

Kimberly Brooks: First of all, fashion is amazing, and it’s this sort of ephemeral form of art in and of itself. A painting can last hundreds, hopefully, thousands of years, but that beautiful Givenchy skirt is for a season. You know, like, it just, it doesn’t live-- it only may come together or coalesce in its incarnation on a particular beautiful woman or not once. So I thought, “This is a deeper subject.” I was at LACMA at this lecture on the influence of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli on the paintings of Matisse. You know, it’s like right up my alley. I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna love this!”

Jo Reed: And LACM is the LA County Museum of Art.

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah! And it was thrown by the Costume Council, and I had never been to a Costume Council event at a museum before, and in Los Angeles, the women that attend these events are walking works of art. I mean, one lady decked out head-to-toe Alexander McQueen the pirate season. I mean, you know, just sort of like, “Wow. This is a huge subject.” Literally, if I could’ve rolled back time, I would love to, like, set up a scrim and just do like a portrait series of all those women. And it occurred to me, “What if I took the most famous stylists in the world, the, that were the ones that were the arbiters and the tastemakers and ask them to style themselves and pose for me and I will paint them?” And so that was, you know, that was a couple-year journey.

Jo Reed: And that was the stylist project?

Kimberly Brooks: Yes, and it was a great project, and I love portraiture because that was always a huge subject for me and I took it to that nth degree and painted, Grace Coddington and, you know, Elizabeth Stewart and just all the major stylists.

Jo Reed: And it’s interesting you went from that to painting much less figuratively.

Kimberly Brooks: Right. Well, it’s interesting because sometimes you do things on purpose as a, you know, as an artist and you think, “I’m going to do this for this reason,” and other times you don’t know why you’re doing things. You know, after “The Stylist Project,” I created a very melty, loose, drippy version of portraiture called “Thread.” And I was trying to like tug at the thread and kind of unravel the whole idea of painting portraits and those were the last real people and then the next show after that was called, “I Notice People Disappear.” And I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson, so a lot of times I get ideas for the titles of paintings or the show from her poetry, and I think that’s a version of a line in a poem. And so after the show, I started painting interiors for the first time or suggestions of them, and I started to build up this historical drama in my head that I was actually illustrating, that it just didn’t happen to have text. And my father had passed away within that couple-year period, and he was this bright, shining star. And a good friend said to me, “You know, this is about him being gone,” and I was just -- tears just spilled out of my eyes. I couldn’t believe she said that and I couldn’t believe that I was so unconscious of what I had been working on … it just amazing how art is sort of, can be a divining rod for your internal self.

Jo Reed: Oh, of course. In that show, I Notice People Disappear, Blue Drawing Room is a painting that really haunts me.

Kimberly Brooks: Mm. Yeah, that--

Jo Reed: Can you describe that and--

Kimberly Brooks: I will. It’s, well--

Jo Reed: Because it just seems like such a bridge or a hinge between what you did earlier to what you’re doing now.

Kimberly Brooks: That’s such a great observation. Well, let me first talk about the color and the approach.

Kimberly Brooks: It’s a sitting area with these curtains that are tied to the side, and there’s a seating area. After being very deep into portraiture, I literally start with the back to the front, so if there’s an item that I wanted to pick I have to go to the furthest away. So start with the sky, then the bones of the room, and then the walls and then the drapes and then the seating area and then this flood of light on the floor and then the people. So I painted in the order of the things that are closest to me, but instead of actually laying on the people when it came to that time. And it was very, you know, lots of indigo and burnt sienna and burnt umber and very somber tones and lots of glazing. Many, many, many layers of glazing to get the effect of light just pouring through it. I painted these figures just with just a glaze, almost like they were ghosts and they’re facing each other, but, you know, they’re not articulated very well. In fact, the twinkling lights in the front are just maybe captured with, like, three strokes each, just a faint whisper, and you can tell that there’s just this, depiction of a past future or a future past of these two people sitting together.

Jo Reed: It’s really a wonderful painting. A, it’s beautiful to look at, but I love the idea of the trace and somebody not being there but the trace of them remains.

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah. And I think, in this current show, I feel like every interior space is a portrait. Every, even if it’s just a abstract version of one, it’s still a portrait because there’s this human quality to a space where you wonder, “What, who was in that space and what happened there, and what’s about to happen?” You know, it’s very exciting for me because I never thought I would become this kind of painter. So I think actually the title, Brazen, was me giving my permission to myself to really go off the reservation and be, you know, brave and daring into directions I didn’t expect.

Kimberly Brooks: There’s this poetry curator named Keith Martin that has been following my work on Instagram for a few years. And he’ll take a lot of L.A. artists, and he’ll pair their work with a poem like Neruda. And so I was seeing my work pop up on Instagram, and I was being tagged with a beautiful poem next to it, and so I reached out to him before this exhibition, and now he’s put together, four fantastic L.A.-based poets, and they’re doing a live poetry reading. They’ve each written original poems based on the paintings in the show, and they’re going to perform them on Sunday, October 29th, at 2:00 P.M., if anybody’s in Los Angeles and wants to see it, and they’re making a book of this combination of poetry and paintings, which my work is so literary in my mind anyway, so it’s just perfect. I’m so excited about it.

Jo Reed: Well, in your current show Brazen, you have a painting called Remembrance which depicts and old-fashioned room with the walls in muted colors and the focal point is an open doorway and that reveals a space that’s this silvery grey. It is remarkably evocative. Your mind just goes crazy with what, “what is beyond that doorway?”

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah. That, that was a breakthrough piece in the show. It was one of those moments where I finished way earlier than I expected because when I stood back, I went, “Ah, this is done.” You know, just had that feeling, “And I better stop now.” What was interesting about it, it was the first painting where I incorporated both silver and gold leaf, and it’s this very muted greenish-gray room. I mean, generally I make my own grays, I make my own blacks. I never, like, buy it out of the tube, but there’s this great color that I really like called Portland gray. This is just for the painting nerds that are listening. So I was cutting every color with that pigment, so it was super soft, and this room had a silver detail on the wall. So silver molding that went up to the ceiling and then on the wall, which was painted like this very, very muted turquoisey green were paintings that were framed in gold. Like a landscape and a portrait, and then below those paintings is a gilded Victorian chair. So I was thinking, “Ah, silver and gold. I want to play with that a little bit,” and then, oh. Behind the doorway, the opening, I had fully intended to create this beautiful silver Shinwasery type of screen and kind of take advantage of the effects of the silver leaf and the gold leaf together. So I made the doorway silver leaf and then I made the silver lining on the walls and then I made the gold leaf frames. And I fully intended to like, do all these various details, and instead I left the silver doorway just blank. It’s just the silver leaf, and it has the most haunting effect. When you walk by it, you see your shadow. It’s like the painting becomes alive. It vibrates and reflects in such an amazing way, so it was like, “Ah, that’s like a cool effect,” because it makes the viewer interact with the painting in a way that a viewer normally doesn’t. So it’s a good discovery.

Jo Reed: What’s the most challenging part of the work for you? Is it the beginning, is it knowing when to end? Is it getting over that hump in the middle?

Kimberly Brooks: The truth is it’s the beginning of an exhibition. I mean, I make a foam core model of the space that I’m going to show in the very beginning because I want to see the space. So it’s like a half inch to an inch model, so I can sketch ideas of how I want to lay it out, like what sizes I want where and if there’s, like, an entryway. You know so I start to map it out in the beginning, and that’s sort of the scariest part because you really haven’t locked into something. And I’m not the kind of painter where I’m painting the same type of paintings over and over again. I evolve and I have to, I give myself room to do that, so that’s like the hardest part but once I catch my groove, I feel like, like, I’m on the streets for a while until I get on the freeway, but even when I’m on the freeway, like, I can get in an accident, so…<laughter> you know, it just, it’s never perfectly smooth and I don’t think it is for any artist, but I think--

Jo Reed: <laughs> I don’t think it is either.

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah. And the other thing is, what I was saying in the beginning of this interview about being open to what the painting wants to be as opposed to what I want it to be. The older I get, the more I, the earlier I stop and the more surprised I am by how much the work of art wants if I just listen. I think that’s just such a huge part of the process.

Jo Reed: I think, mostly does come with getting older. Because, you know--

Kimberly Brooks: Right.

Jo Reed: --when we’re all young we all have so much to say because we’re sure nobody’s ever said it yet, and then--

Kimberly Brooks: Right.

Jo Reed: <laughs> --as you get a little bit older you’re thinking, “Oh, wait a minute. Other people might have something to say too.”

Kimberly Brooks: Right. And you get wise to the work. Creativity means you’re creating -- you’re creating something new that’s never existed before and that has a mind of its own that you have to hear.

Jo Reed: Writing has also been a very large part of your life.

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah. I’m actually writing a book about painting right now, but it’s not out yet. Yes, I founded the art section of the Huffington Post, and I started a column called “First Person Artist,” it must’ve been over ten years ago, where I made it a part of my practice to interview a different artist every week. You know, that led me to do some really deep thinking about the whole art-making process. And I wrote this essay which became a TED Talk called “The Creative Process in Eight Stages,” where I talked about getting ready for an exhibition. Where I, like, form a triage unit and decide that my paintings are either rock stars, orphans or rescue missions. You know, have to pick.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Kimberly Brooks: Pick what, you know, I say, “Okay. You’re a rock star. You go over there. You’re a rescue mission, and you are hopeless. It’s never going to work.” <laughs> You know, you have to make these brutal calls, like, two weeks before a show. You have to, like, come to Jesus. Like, it’s funny, because sometimes the orphans become the best painting of the show if you’re willing to give it a chance, because it’s a weird part of the process, like, I break up with paintings all the time. I’m like, “I had so much hope for you, and this is over now.” I can’t deal with it; I can’t deal with the painting. I don’t want to look at it; it depresses me. And then like months will go by, and then I’ll be like you know what, I’m gonna pick up that piece. I have nothing to lose, and I’m just going to go attack it. And those are the paintings that tend to be the best ones. I wish I could plan those but, you know…

Jo Reed: Yeah. It just has to happen.

Kimberly Brooks: Yeah, it just has to happen. You have to be willing to say, “You know what? I have nothing to lose, so let me see if I could make a little magic here,” and that’s when I take the most risks. So writing has been, you know, just a huge part of helping me think about painting in a way that’s, you know, just completely different.

Jo Reed: Mm-hm. And you also just edited a book of your father’s work, who was the great Leonard Shlain, whose work I’ve admired for a long time.

Kimberly Brooks: Well, my father was this <laughs> amazing human being, and he passed away in 2009. He started off, as a general and vascular surgeon. He pioneered laparoscopy, and he loved to read, and he just had a huge curiosity and thirst for everything, and he started to read extensively about the split-brain phenomena. You know, this was in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and he also read physics in his spare time, and he devoured everything about art and art history, and we went to museums all the time, and so his first book was Art & Physics, you know, Art & Physics was basically saying that artists and scientists are saying the same things but with different languages, and, “Oh, by the way, the artist tends to say them first.” You know he published that in 91 and now it’s an international best-seller. And actually, that’s just about to be released on Viking on audio which is exciting. And then the last few years of his life he was working on this manuscript about the brain of Leonardo Davinci and it was about Leonardo’s Brain and in a way it’s like this amazing synthesis of all the books he written in the past in the sense that he said that in order to save our species were going to have too much better integrate right brain, left brain. The whole right and the left there’s a controversy over whether or not that’s a proper way to conceptually frame. Putting that aside Da Vinci was known as this incredible artist, and he painted the “Mona Lisa,” but they didn’t discover or translate his 20,000 pages of scientific work until like 20 years ago. They didn’t realize what a brilliant scientist he was and he was this incredible proto-human in my father’s eyes of what we need to become. So the book Leonardo’s Brain, we published it posthumously, and Lyons Press published it, and then my brother and sister and I, the three Shlain kids basically, went on a three-city book tour or four-city book tour, and we promoted the book on our father’s behalf. You know, it was an honor. Every time I mention him I feel like I keep him alive a little bit.

Jo Reed: And in case people missed it, your father was Author, Thinker, Doctor, Leonard Schlain. Now speaking of the different parts of the brain. You created something you called the Creativity Notebook.

Jo Reed: And isn’t that in a way trying to bring both sides of the brain together? <laughs>

Kimberly Brooks: Absolutely. I find that when my appointments and my notes are--

Jo Reed: And you should explain what it is too, I’m sorry.

Kimberly Brooks: Okay. So basically I decided that the best new technology for this new year would be this notebook that I’ve been prototyping for years. Because whenever things were in my phone in terms of like my calendar or, you know, I wanted to take notes-- and by the way, there’s nothing worse when you’re a teacher to have a student standing in front of you tapping into their phone to take their notes. You know, to take notes about what you’re saying because you think, obviously, “Are you listening to me?” you know, and it’s just a whole Conversation 42B. But I created this notebook where you have the dates in the back and then the front is divided the left side is for your ideas and thoughts and the right is for your list of tasks. And I deliberately incorporate artwork into it so that the visual scaffolding that you have gives you a sense of space around each week that’s not just something, like, hidden in the digits of your phone, you know, they’re very simple to use, and it’s super gratifying and tactile. When a student is learning, and they write it down, they take notes instead of just typing it, they’ve done a million studies where they show that you learn more and you upload it in your own brain better if you actually write it down instead of tapping it into a phone. You know in the end I think mark making is just such a huge part of the process.

Jo Reed: Kimberly Brooks thank you so much for giving me your time. It’s really been a pleasure talking to you.

Kimberly Brooks: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

Jo Reed: That’s artist Kimberly Brooks—her show Brazen runs through October 28 at the Zevitas Marcus Gallery. And if you can’t make it to LA, you see her work on her website KimberlyBrooks.com.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. And the Art Works podcast is now available on Itunes—please subscribe and if you like us—leave us a rating—it will help people to find us.

For the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.